At once simple and complex, sensual and down to earth, tea attracts us today not least for its cosmopolitan character: these little leaves traverse oceans and continents to establish themselves in our daily lives and make us, in our turn, dream of journeying. The last twenty years have seen not just the West fall for tea but Asia too, the Japanese in particular. It is drunk everywhere in the world, consumed it for thousands of years. Tea is as a symbol of sharing and hospitality that has entered traditions and been ritualised in a thousand different ways. In each country its taste is adapted: powdery, bitter and velvety in Japan, sweet and strong in Russia, robust beneath the added milk in the UK. The study of the `ethno-consumption´ of tea is therefore (in the first part of this volume) an opportunity for a fabulously exotic voyage across continents and centuries. Enriched by this long interaction with humanity´s daily life and laden with so much craft and knowledge, in today´s Europe tea has become a gastronomic product of infinite flavours and scents, savoured with nose, eyes and mind. This is a refined, noble, modern product. Like wine, it has its own prestige growing regions and great plantations and tea-tasting cannot be lightly undertaken. This work is the first ever to set out the principles of tea-tasting (which starts with the creation of a lexicon of scents). Illustrated with Bruno Suet´s sumptuous photos, this work takes the reader into all the various world inhabited by tea, exotic and remote
